Debian Etch has been serving me well for a few years with wonderfully easy and infrequent maintenance.

However it's at the end of its life

http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100121

So I've upgraded to Lenny following these instructions

http://www.debian.org/releases/lenny/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en....

It was remarkably painless

One small problem with the mail system.

I recently bought a Sony e-reader, the main Linux package to support this is calibre but I found that it wouldn't automatically sync my ebooks.

 The FAQ says 

 "The linux kernel can export two version of SYSFS, one of which is deprecated."

Apparently Debian Lenny exports the deprecated version and you have to recompile the kernel to undo this.

Debian has a very strict policy on free and legal software. This helps keep everyone honest, but sometimes a pragmatic approach is called for. MP3 is a file format that is patent encumbered - but also in universal use.

I could use the supplied Ogg Vorbis tools but then my music wouldn't work everywhere I want it to.

So I want to install Lame which is only available in source.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/files/

Download and extract

I've just installed Debian Lenny and generally am impressed with how well things are auto detected and configured - so much easier than a few years ago - and in many ways easier than a Windows install where you have to constantly find 3rd party drivers to get things working.

 However getting wifi running was a bit trickier (largely because of FCC regulations  affecting licenses and default settings).

This document got me most of the way

http://wiki.debian.org/iwlwifi

Additional lines in /etc/.network/interfaces

One of the great things about Debian/Ubuntu is the consistency with which system documentation is placed in /usr/share/doc/

Assuming you have a web server installed this documentation is then available at http://localhost/doc/

But to keep filesize down - many files are compressed and have to be decompressed before you can read them.

The browser can actually do that compression on the fly - if it receives the right headers - what it needs to be told is that the content is compressed plain text.

The basic search is:

aptitude search apache

Returns all packages that match

To search only for the installed versions

aptitude search ~iapache

To search for the packages that aren't installed

aptitude search \!\(~i\)apache2

Search Term reference

http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/projects/aptitude/doc/en/ch02s03s05.html

Just got a new UPS and it’s working nicely :-)

This is one of those tasks that I do infrequently and forget how it works…

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86